Free The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg

curtains aside to look, and we look back. There’s
     more than enough time for acknowledgment.
    East of our place runs a two-lane blacktop road just like the ones that crisscross Iowa. Most of the time it’s pretty quiet,
     but for a few hours on weekends it carries a lot of traffic. Squads of bikers come rumbling down the hill, while RVs struggle
     up the hill. On Saturdays a parade of pickup trucks towing race cars makes its way to the track ten miles northwest of us.
     In winter and on rainy days, truckers rattle their jake brakes all the way down the hill.
    Whenever I work in the vegetable garden or attend to the bees or feed the horses, I step into an amphitheater that rises from
     the road. I imagine myself as a child driving past in the backseat of the family car, looking across a pasture at a man walking
     down the yard in a bee suit and a veil. I’m visible for only a second and then I’m gone.

    A visit to Walden Pond doesn’t resolve the image of Henry Thoreau. What it does instead is clarify the contradictions, the
     disparities from which that image is shaped. The light rising from the surface of the pond on a June afternoon reflects indiscriminately
     on the objects around it. The same was true of Thoreau’s mind, no matter how ill assorted the objects he wrote about might
     have been. What harmony there is in Thoreau’s thinking, I believe, came from the collision of dissimilar ideas, the struggle,
     as he might have put it, between the acorn and the chestnut obeying their own laws.
    Thoreau’s best work is the result of two very different but complementary perspectives. One came about when he refused to
     pay his poll tax and was jailed in Concord for a night. Of the village and its institutions on that evening, he wrote that
     he was “fairly inside of it.” The other perspective was, of course, the one he took when he chose to live fairly outside of
     Concord, in a small, handbuilt cabin on a rise above Walden Pond.
    Both stances, for that’s what they were, were honored a couple of summers ago in a clearing on Pine Hill, just southeast of
     the pond, by a crowd that included the president and the first lady. The occasion was the dedication of the Thoreau Institute
     and the permanent conservation of ninety-six acres of the Walden Woods, both brought about by Don Henley, lead vocalist of
     the Eagles.
    President and Mrs. Clinton had come to Walden at Henley’s invitation. So too had the professors who introduced Henley to Thoreau’s
     writings, and so had Mohandas Gandhi’s great-granddaughter and Ed Begley Jr. and the rest of the Eagles. And so, most improbably
     of all, had Tony Bennett, who jogged out of the Walden Woods and onto the stage as if it were the Copacabana. He sang one
     unaccompanied verse of “America” and then trotted back into the arms of the waiting foliage. It was an afternoon of disparities,
     which the bright sun did nothing to dispel.
    When the president stepped up to the lectern and leaned his arms across the top, I couldn’t help thinking of what Thoreau
     noticed during his night in jail—not the striking of the town clock or “the evening sounds of the village,” but the fact that
     he’d never “seen its institutions before.” I’d never seen the institution of the presidency in person before, but the man
     on the stage stood deep within it, and he talked about the distortion it created, remembering a time when he and his wife
     could walk in the woods without the experience seeming more real to observers than it did to the two of them.
    It was a basic trope of Thoreau’s mind to search for a point of view slightly higher than the one you could gain from the
     top of Pine Hill. He couldn’t say what you might see from the very highest vantage point, but perhaps his own was high enough.
     “It is not many moments,” he wrote, “that I live under a government, even in this world.” I tried to imagine what Thoreau
     might have said about the tribute